Once again proving my adage that I don't need to buy nearly as many new books as I used to, now that I've realized that every time I re-read a book, it's as a new person, I'm back to taking another look at David Loy's Nonduality.  (That's a newer edition; I have the 2010 version.) It was just about a year ago that I wrote about the book in my aptly titled post, "Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject. In that post I shared links to three previous posts about the book, the first written in January 2015. Because I've been writing recently about how nonduality is viewed by S ..read more

While I said in my last post that I'd be moving on from the subject of predictive processing, I'm only going to go halfway there. Because I want to explore something that stood out for me in one of the slides I shared in that post from a talk by Shamil Chandaria about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation." This is how I described the blue box with various terms for Non-Dual Awareness and its associated orange'ish note in my previous blog post. Emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, is one of the spiritual notions (in the blue box) that Chandaria says are similar phenomenology (meaning, as experience ..read more

Don't worry, Church of the Churchless visitors who aren't as interested as I am in the hot new neuroscience theory of predictive processing by the brain, which is why I've been writing about Andy Clark's book The Experience Machine recently. I'll be on to other topics soon. But not quite yet, since I want to share some of what I learned by watching Shamil Chandaria's talk on YouTube about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation." I heard Chandaria and Sam Harris engage in a fascinating conversation on Harris' Waking Up app.  That led me to watch Chandaria's talk, since he's knowledgeable about ..read more

Well, I've finished the book I've been writing about recently, Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. I enjoyed it a lot. In this post I'll share some tips from the final chapters about how we can use the theory of predictive processing to improve how we experience life. This is a leading theory of modern neuroscience, with references to it popping up in many places. For example, here's how a review of The Experience Machine in a recent issue of New Scientist starts out. On a building site, there is a scream of pain. A worker has jumped down from scaffold ..read more

I realize that some people don't resonate with Andy Clark's writing style as much as I do. So for those who find the excerpts I've been sharing from Clark's book, The Experience Machine, to be unduly confusing, here's a blog post I wrote in 2021 about the views of a neuroscientist, Anil Seth, with views similar to Clark's. Everybody's brain is producing a kind of hallucination ..read more

Before I criticize a comment on a recent blog post by Spence Tepper, a frequenter commenter on this blog, I want to start off on a warmer note. I've never met Tepper in person, but I like him through his words. He's intelligent, a good writer, and often makes a good case for his beliefs -- which are more sympathetic toward the supernatural and mystical experience than my own, but since I used to believe in much the same way he does, I understand where he is coming from. It's good to have a mixture of religious believers and religious skeptics commenting on this blog. Definitely makes for more ..read more

Before discussing the subject that's the title of this post - how the brain makes predictions come true -- I'll shoehorn in a related personal story about my check ordering saga. Recently Columbia Bank, which my wife and I use for a checking account, was bought by Umpqua Bank. For many years I've ordered checks for our Columbia Bank account when the supply ran low. Last month was the first time I'd ordered checks with Umpqua Bank on them. Balancing our checkbook about a week ago, I noticed that we'd been charged on May 17 for the cost of mailing the Umpqua Bank checks I'd ordered. That got me ..read more

I'm continuing to read and enjoy Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. It's one of the best books about modern neuroscience that I've ever read, and believe me, I've read a lot of them. My first post about the book laid a foundation for these subsequent posts, as I get deeper into The Experience Machine. This is a one sentence summary of the Big Idea discussed in the book -- which makes a heck of a lot of sense. Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain, and it is in their shifting balances that ..read more

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences. Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to the sound of bird noises. Except, he soon ..read more

For several years, a few decades ago, I became obsessed with the great Sufi poet, Rumi. I devoured every English translation of his writings I could find, also buying books that weren't literal translations, but were written in the spirit of Rumi. Eventually I donated most of my Rumi books when my obsession abated. But I kept a few, including William C. Chittick's translation of Rumi, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. One reason I held on to that book was that it contained my favorite Rumi quotation, from his Masnavi.  Fear the existence in which you are now! Your im ..read more